nothing to hear at the moment, the
rush of air through the vent convinced him the audio was working nominally.
Dominic Caruso repeated this process twice more over the course of the next hour. The second bug-bot he placed in a duct overlooking the great room. The camera afforded only a narrow view of the sofa area and the entry hall — by no means a perfect shot of every corner of the room — but Caruso felt sure the microphone was positioned well to record anything that was said in the room below.
The third bug-bot started normally and moved a few inches, but stopped within a foot of the entrance to the ventilation system. Dom and Jack spent a few minutes troubleshooting the problem, but finally they gave up, unable to tell if there was some hardware damage to the transmitter or if a software glitch was creating the problem. They declared the device dead, and Caruso moved on to the last robot. This one he placed in a second-floor office area without any problems.
By seven a.m. the operation was complete and Dominic powered down all the cameras. The surveillance equipment, the cameras and the microphones, were passive systems, meaning they did not operate all the time — instead they had to be turned on remotely. This saved battery power greatly, but it also would be incredibly beneficial for an operation that was expected to last a week or more.
Caruso called Granger in Maryland, and Granger confirmed that they had been able to pick up feeds from three of the cameras and audio from three of the mikes, just as Dom, Jack, and Ding could from the bungalow. The feed needed to be sent to The Campus instantly as, it was assumed, much of the audio they would pick up would be in Rehan’s native tongue, and Rick Bell had an Urdu-speaking analyst at the ready twenty-four/seven.
Caruso asked Granger if there was any news about Clark, but John had not checked in. Sam Granger also said that Sam Driscoll had not checked back in yet, either, but they had no reason to suspect anything was amiss.
When Chavez hung up with Granger, he flopped on the couch next to Ryan. Both men were worn out.
At first Jack Jr. was dejected with the success of the mission. “All that work and just three out of five cams and mikes are online? Are you serious? For all we know Rehan likes to sit at the kitchen table when he works. If that’s the case, we’re fucked, because we won’t hear a damn thing that isn’t in the office, the great room, or the master bedroom.”
But Domingo calmed his junior colleague. “Don’t ever forget, ’
Chavez insisted the other two celebrate with him by ordering a massive breakfast. Ryan begged off at first, said he needed to catch some sleep, but once the Moet Champagne, huge omelets, and flaky pastries arrived, Ryan got his second wind and he indulged with the other two.
After breakfast, they cleaned their scuba gear.
And then they slept.
51
It took Clark several days to locate his target in Germany. The man he sought was Manfred Kromm, and Kromm had proven to be an exceedingly challenging person to find. He was not undercover, nor was he taking active measures to ensure he remained hidden. No, Manfred Kromm was difficult to locate because he was a nobody.
Thirty years ago he had played a role in East German intelligence. He and his partner had done something illegal, and Clark had been brought in to sort it out. Now the man was in his seventies, and he was no longer in Berlin, no longer a government employee, and no longer someone who anyone cared about.
Clark knew he was still alive because the questions the FBI asked Hardesty could have been triggered only by Manfred Kromm. Yes, it was possible Kromm could have written down his version of events years ago and passed away in the interim, but Clark did not suppose that was a document Kromm would have written willingly, and he did not suppose there was any reason that information should come to light right now, unless Kromm had only recently told his story.
Kromm now lived in Cologne, Germany, in the state of North Rhine — Westphalia, on the Rhine River. Clark had found his man finally after going to his last known address, a two-story building in the Haselhorst section of Berlin, and then pretending to be a long-lost relative. A woman there knew Kromm had moved to Cologne, and she knew he wore a brace on his leg due to nerve damage from his diabetes. Clark took this information and headed to Cologne, where he spent three full and very long days posing as an employee of a medical equipment company from the United States. He printed up business cards and invoices and phony e-mail exchanges, and he took them to nearly every end-user supplier of medical devices in town. He claimed to have a customized ankle-and-foot orthotic ordered by a man named Kromm, and requested help finding the man’s current address.
Some shops turned him away with a shrug, but most efficiently checked their databases, and one had a listing for a man named Manfred Kromm, age seventy-four, address Thieboldgasse thirteen, flat 3A, who was sent monthly supplies of insulin test strips and syringes.
And just like that, John Clark had found his man.
Clark found the home of his target in the Altstadt of Cologne. Number thirteen Thieboldgasse was a four-story white stucco apartment building that was a carbon copy of the fifty or more that ran down both sides of the road, accented here and there with a single tree out front. The near-identical properties had tiny grass lawns bisected by fifteen-foot walkways up to the single glass doors to their lobbies.
For an hour John strolled the neighborhood in an afternoon rain shower that allowed him to use an umbrella and wear the collar of his raincoat high above his ears and thereby mask his face. He determined possible escape routes in case his meeting did not go well, found his way to the bus stop and to the
The building was not old in the European sense; very little in Cologne could be considered old, as the city had been altogether flattened during the Second World War. Spending several minutes across the street staring at number thirteen Thieboldgasse through the rainfall, Clark found the building to be as featureless and colorless and charmless as the Cold War itself.
Back then, during a Cold War that was never cold enough for men on the sharp edge like John Clark, Clark had come to Germany on a special operation. He was CIA/SAD at the time, the Special Activities Divisie determion.
He was pulled out of a training evolution in North Carolina with members of the Army’s newly minted tier-one unit, Delta Force, and he was put on a CIA 35A Learjet and flown to Europe. After a stop at Mildenhall AFB in Suffolk, England, to refuel, Clark was back in the air.
No one told him where they were taking him or what he’d be doing when he got there.
Clark landed at Tempelhof in Berlin, and was whisked to a safe house within pistol shot of the Berlin Wall.
There he met an old friend named Gene Lilly. They’d worked together in ’Nam, and now Lilly was the chief of CIA’s Berlin Station. Lilly told Clark he was needed for a simple bag-drop operation over the border, but Clark smelled the bullshit in the story. He knew they didn’t need an SAD hard asset for a bag drop. He relayed his doubt to his superior, and then Gene Lilly broke down in tears.
Gene said he’d been caught in a honey trap by a hooker working with a couple of Stasi foot soldiers who’d gone rogue to make some extra cash. They had extorted from him all of his life’s savings, and he needed John to hand over the satchel full of cash and pick up a folder full of negatives. Clark did not ask what was on the negatives
